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[Guide] Itemization, Strategy and Tips for Corki

Item Updates:
Wit's End does not proc on Gatling Gun hits. You cannot make an enemy champion go out of mana (oom) by using this combination.

Comparison of Gatling Gun vs Valkyrie on minions:

For a level 5 Gatling Gun to kill all the minions in a wave, you will need at least 170 attack,

Benefit - the attacks happen quickly so you have a good chance of getting the last hit. Faster cooldown.

Con - you have to farm up a lot of items, or at least a BF Sword before this becomes effective for farming, and you must face ALL the minions and be in range. For the range to work correctly, you need to be almost on top of the melee minions to hit the ranged ones.

Level 5 Valkyrie with no AP will kill all the minions in a wave.

Benefit - Faster farming and pushing, requires no extra items to be effective, can fire and forget - Valkyrie over the minions and either run back to escape retaliation, or run forward to chase a hero while still farming minions.

I was using an AP/Health build for corki before, and doing fairly well with it. (sorc shoes, rod of ages, guinsoo's rageblade, ryali's scepter)

I tried out your item build, and it definitely took some getting used to, especially having about 1k less hitpoints than I was used to.

But after playing it for a while, I *really* like it a lot.

One thing that I saw another corki do though, that I've been messing with, and that I think is a pretty good improvement, is adding Stark's Fervor after the trinity force. This seems to be working out extremely well, and is a great team damage buff as well, especially if you have a DPS heavy team.

Since the nerf to heal, it might be a good choice to take Rally instead of heal and add an early heart of gold for the lost survivability. Rally would help take towers out too, which is a nice bonus being as Corki is a solid pusher. On the other hand with this item build you really *do* need the extra health from heal.

Also I've heard lifesteal (starks in particular) is rude on him.

Does lifesteal and atmas proc on machine gun? I'm picturing a tankorki in my mind...

Hmm, I always though lifesteal procced on gatling hits. Still, though, Stark's seems to be a pretty big teambuff, even with just one or two other DPS champs.

Something else I've been messing around with. Rather than going straight to infinity edge or black cleaver, going guinsoo's rageblade first. We already have some ap from Sheen/Triforce, so the AP from rageblade scales fairly well (meaning we don't already have so little ap that adding the AP from rageblade is inconsequential), and it seems like pretty good +damage for the price (a little more than half the cost of edge)

Personally, I've been getting in the habit of leveling Phosphorous Bomb to 2 or 3, and then switching over to Gatling Gun midgame. Phosphorous Bomb's early-game harassment potential before you get decent gear is too good to pass up, but Gatling Gun is powerful enough with a couple of +damage items that it feels like a waste to leave it until the very end.

Not only does it help you chase down and kill enemy champions when Valkyrie is down, but it can be a useful pushing tool too. Yeah, Valkyrie is better most of the time, but when you're pushed right up near a tower guarded by minion waves and an enemy champion, flying into it face-first just to clear out the minions is suicidal. Gatling Gun lets you clear out the whole enemy wave from a safe range and break the minion stalemate.

Granted, I don't have all that much experience yet, but this seems like a good compromise to me.

Unless you have at least 2 other physical dps champs on your team, starks probably isn't worth it as a teambuff.

When you do have a couple other DPS champs though (Warwick, Yi, Tristana, Ashe, Tryndamere, Jax, etc), starks seems to be very worthwhile for the team support, even though it delays your +damage to help out gatling.

But sometimes there just aren't enough other heroes for starks to be useful, or you have somebody who typically builds starks anyway and probably builds it faster than you (lots of sivirs seem to, and almost every Yi I've seen recently does as well). In that case, I've been building Bloodthirster instead. Nice damage bonus, plus lifesteal, which lets you survive fights you might not otherwise, and also keeps you from having to bluepill all the time because you're still pretty squishy since this build includes very little health and no armor.

So my item build looks like this:

1 Sheen
2 Berzerker's Greaves
3 Phage
4 Zeal
5 Triforce
6 BF Sword/Recurve Bow/Vampiric Scepter (Depending on whether I'm going for starks or Bloodthirster, and I usually just buy the best part that I can with whatever money I happen to have when I head back to town)
7 Finish Stark's or Bloodthirster
8 Guinsoos Rageblade
9 Whateverthehellyouwantcausethegameshouldbeaboutoverifyougetthisfar. (usually infinity's edge, but sometimes black cleaver if there's a lot of armor out there)

If there are a lot of casters on the other team, and I'm getting pwned by magic damage, which happens quite a bit against annie and kassadin, sometimes I insert a banshee's veil in between phage and zeal. (or at least the negatron cloak part of the veil)

Word of warning. I've had a lot of players as I climb the ranks question my choice of Triforce, saying I should build Frost Mallet instead, or otherwise telling me how I should build items.

But I'll say this much: I've played a LOT of corki, cause he seems to be a really good fit for how I really like to play the game, and tried a lot of different item builds on my own, but never really messed around with Triforce before reading this guide. Before switching to the item build I'm currently using, my record was something slightly above 50% over about 200 games since the last reset, almost all as Corki. After switching to sheen first, leading into triforce then starks, I think I've won something close to 75%-80% of my games, and am starting to see names from the pre-release top 500. Obviously the games I'm getting placed in are getting tougher, and that's slowing down a LOT, but I went from something like 100 wins and 95 losses (don't remember exactly, but I was definitely very close to even, it might have been 100/90, but certainly not more than a 10 game difference between wins and losses) to my current stats of 145 wins and 106 losses.

Obviously some part of that can simply be attributed to simply getting better at the game and getting better at playing pretty much the only hero I ever play, and maybe I'm just on a really lucky streak of getting put on the better team, but I have to believe a big part of it is just that the item build is so solid. Triforce is a much better item for corki than most people give credit for, because corki really is a versatile hero, and can use a little bit of everything, which is exactly what triforce provides, without really losing out from the lack of focus, because there's not a single thing that triforce provides that is not useful for you.